Notes and Editorial Reviews

When Gianluca Cascioli received First Prize at the Umberto Micheli International Piano Competition in Milan in 1994 he was only 15. The jury included Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, Charles Rosen, Louis Lortie and Maurizio Pollini, among other luminaries, and it was indeed a competition to stand out from the general run in that it required the participants to demonstrate a breadth of ability by performing in each round a work by Beethoven as well as several demanding modern works...

The musical personality is already persuasive...Cascioli has much to say about everything he plays. And there is something very likeable about his style: not at all didactic or over-insistent but inviting, unforced, sharing. There’s a feeling forRead more phrase and harmonic shapes and a natural warmth that make the business of communication seem an easy affair. And always such good sound! The Hamburg studio recordings are first-class.

Another Pollini in the making, or at any rate a pianist in a not dissimilar mould? Do hear him.